The truth-machine: continuity and the ontology of the moving image of cinema

Abstract

The analytical nature of representation is inconsistent with the homogeneity of the continuum. This inconsistency determines the moving image of cinema; for, the cinematographic apparatus employs photographic still images to reconstitute the appearance of motion of the real world. Bergson claims that this cinematographic perception is also characteristic of our understanding of the real world; the qualitative essence of movement and time is spatially abstracted through representation for the demands of differentiation and quantification. Ensuing an overturning of time's relation to movement in modern philosophy, Deleuze's theory for the image rectifies the misconception of cinematic movement as discontinuity. Considering the novel representability of continuity in the cinema, this thesis proceeds to a rethinking of the image's significance for an understanding of worldly being by defining a new ontological account for the moving Image. The study of the technological genesis of the moving image discloses its ontological difference from the photographic image. Scrutinizing representation of movement in chronophotographic practice, the spatial abstraction of continuity caused by photographic seriality Is revealed thus enabling a departure from the traditional understanding of cinema's temporality. The practice based research - which is also concerned with the issues of continuity's representability and the falsification of perception of the moving and still Image - produces formal cinematic devices used for the making of the feature length documentary an Anthology of Easter. Challenging the conventional poetic and aesthetic modalities of non-fiction film, it addresses the question of the continuity of movement, time and space and engages with the intelligible perception of the real world as a referent of the moving image. Finally, the thesis proposes that the moving image of cinema enhances the notion of indexicality; for, it provides us the unique representational sign that retains the continuous nature of time, in the image of the real world.